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Oct. 25, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

52:35

Clintonian Lies And A Republican Flake Out | Ep. 403

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	Another big Hillary Clinton lie blows up the political scene.
	Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is on his way out, and he slams the door on his way out.
	We'll talk about all of that.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	So a couple of huge news items that I want to go through today in detail, give you my perspective on them, and give you a little bit of background so that you know what you're talking about when you talk about it at the water cooler today.
	But before we get to that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
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	Okay, so something that may not have you sleeping well at night and certainly doesn't have Hillary Clinton sleeping well at night is a story that is breaking out from the Washington Post last night.
	So, you need a little bit of background to understand what exactly is going on here.
	So, first I have to explain to you what the Trump-Russia dossier is.
	If you remember back to earlier this year, BuzzFeed released a dossier that was full of information, some of it more credible than others.
	People have been saying that the entire dossier has been debunked.
	That is not true.
	Some of the dossier has actually been substantiated.
	Some of the dossier has not.
	The parts that were not substantiated included the absurd allegation that Donald Trump went to Moscow and rented a room that the Obamas stayed in and then had a bunch of Russian prostitutes come in and pee all over the bed, right?
	That was peegate, if you recall this.
	It was ridiculous.
	We made fun of it.
	And that, of course, is not true, or at least there's no evidence to that effect.
	If there were, then that would be the greatest political story in the history of mankind, but it is not.
	So in any case, that dossier comes out from BuzzFeed earlier this year, and it came out because it had been presented, the dossier, to President Trump, or at least a summary of the allegations had been presented to President Trump by then-FBI Director James Comey just before Trump became President of the United States.
	So where did this dossier come from?
	The reason people were asking this is because there were concerns that maybe the Russians had basically been putting out bad info and that bad info had been used by the Obama administration as an excuse to wiretap all of Trump's friends.
	This is the allegation.
	The allegation is, and it's more of a conspiracy theory than an allegation, that the Russians We're using Christopher Steele basically as a cutout.
	This is the spy who's responsible for the compilation of the dossier that he knew that the Russians were giving him bad information.
	He put it in the dossier, which was funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
	That dossier was then provided to the Obama FBI, and the Obama FBI used that as an excuse to wiretap people like Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor.
	Or Mike Flynn, the one-time Trump national security advisor.
	That's the allegation anyway.
	There are a few pieces of evidence that have to be there in order for this allegation to hold true.
	One, we have to show that Christopher Steele, the spy, actually was being played by the Russians.
	Number two, we have to show that the DNC and Hillary knew that Christopher Steele was being played by the Russians.
	That would look like collusion.
	Right?
	The sort of collusion that Democrats have been accusing Trump of.
	And three, we would have to show that the FBI, in bad faith, went after people like Carter Page and people like Mike Flynn based on evidence they knew was shoddy in order to target them.
	That contention is pretty extreme, considering that, again, if the Democrats were really focused on just getting out bad information about Trump, then why would this dossier not have come out in, say, September of 2016, like before the election?
	It didn't.
	So here is the full timeline on the Trump The Trump-Russia dossier.
	So Wikipedia actually has a pretty good timeline here, so I'll use that as the basis for this.
	In September 2015, there was a wealthy Republican donor who opposed Trump's candidacy in the Republican primary, so he went to Fusion GPS and asked them to compile an OPPO research file.
	For months, they did.
	Okay, then, this Republican donor, after Trump won the nomination, the Republican donor basically dropped out, and that's when, in April 2016, the investigation contract and funding was taken over by a law firm called Perkins Coy, owned by Mark Elias.
	Or Elias.
	He's the lawyer who represented both the DNC and the Clinton presidential campaign.
	So the Hillary campaign knew.
	The DNC knew.
	The Hillary people are claiming they didn't know.
	That's really not credible.
	And it was not until after Elias came on board that Christopher Steele was hired as the dossier compiler.
	So the claim has been basically that even Mark Elias didn't know Steele was the guy compiling the dossier.
	That's a little bit weak.
	In June 2016, it was revealed the DNC had been hacked by Russian sources.
	So Fusion GPS hired Orbis Business Intelligence, which is a private British intelligence firm, to look into the Russian connections.
	And that investigation was undertaken by Steele.
	That's how Steele gets involved.
	He only gets involved after the Democrats take over the funding for the Trump-Russia dossier.
	He delivers his report in a series of memos from June through September.
	He believed the FBI was not taking it seriously.
	And so it ended up in the hands of John McCain, among other people, who brought it to the FBI.
	And finally, James Comey, in January 2017, brings it to the attention of President Trump.
	That's the timeline on the Trump-Russia dossier.
	So it is not correct when the media say that the Republicans funded the Steele dossier.
	That's not technically true.
	They funded the beginning of the investigation before Steele was involved.
	When the Republicans, when conservatives say that this was obvious collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Russian government, again, no evidence to that effect.
	In fact, there is much more evidence that Donald Trump Jr., for example, was attempting to make nice with the Russians than that Hillary Clinton was attempting to make nice with the Russians, at least insofar as this.
	She was attempting to make nice with the Russians, in all likelihood, with regard to selling 20% of America's uranium stockpile.
	But with regard to gathering Trump oppo intel research, not any evidence to support that.
	Also, the idea that the FBI was acting on orders from the Kremlin in order to get Trump, that also seems like a bit of a stretch.
	The reason that I lay all of this out is because I want you to have the truth about what exactly is happening here.
	I think that there's a lot of lies being told by both sides.
	On the left, they're saying, this is no big deal at all.
	You know, oppo research is oppo research.
	What's the big deal?
	The big deal is that if you knew, and we don't know the answer to this yet, if you knew the OPPO research was based on Russian intel, and the Russians were funneling that intel to Christopher Steele, then it looks like collusion.
	So we just don't know the answer to that one yet.
	On the right, the same answer applies.
	We don't know the answer to that one yet, so you can't assume that such collusion was taking place in the first place.
	So here's what the Washington Post reported, and here's the key component, okay?
	Mark Elias apparently lied to the New York Times about his involvement in the dossier.
	So apparently he told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who's not involved in the compilation of the dossier at all.
	He suggested the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign did not fund the dossier.
	That turns out to be false.
	The Washington Post reports that last night, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin.
	People familiar with the matter said.
	Mark Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
	After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intel officer with ties to the FBI and the US intelligence community.
	So Maggie Haberman was getting all sorts of crap over at the New York Times because yesterday, after this came out, she tweeted out, quote, folks involved in funding this lied about it and with sanctimony for a year.
	Now, it just shows you that the rabid left is just as bad as some of the more rabid people on the right.
	They went after Maggie Haberman tooth and nail for this.
	So Mark Elias lied to her.
	She said he lied to me, and she's the bad guy.
	She's the problem here, Maggie Haberman, who has been thoroughly, thoroughly Trump-skeptical from the start.
	In any case, it says, Fusion GPS officials had pled the fifth before the House Intel Committee to avoid answering funding questions.
	So there's still questions.
	Why was the DNC, and why were Hillary hiding this?
	That's the big question here.
	Why?
	What do they have to hide?
	Because they were lying about it.
	For months.
	Or taking the fifth.
	Like, what's the big deal?
	Why didn't they just come up front and say, listen, sure, we funded an OPPO research file.
	Sure, Christopher Steele was one of those guys.
	So?
	So?
	I mean, if the implication is, well, they were using foreign sources to gather intel, we already knew that from Hillary's camp.
	They were using the Ukrainian government to gather foreign intel.
	We know that.
	Politico reported it last year.
	So, again, the real question here is, as always with the Clintons, what are they trying to hide?
	The Clintons are so bad at covering things up that whenever they cover things up, the cover-up ends up being worse than the original crime, right?
	Hillary did this with regard to the Whitewater papers.
	Hillary's still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI.
	Hillary Clinton did this with regard to her email chains, right?
	She deleted 33,000 emails, then claimed it was completely innocent.
	Every clumsy attempt to obfuscate the truth ends up making people more and more suspicious.
	There's a reason to be suspicious around here.
	There's a reason to be suspicious about all of this.
	There's also a reason to be suspicious because it's not like Fusion GPS hasn't worked with the Russians before.
	So William Browder is a businessman who pushed for sanctions on Russia.
	He's testified in the past that the Russian government used Fusion GPS before to conduct a smear campaign against him personally.
	Browder admitted he couldn't connect Russian funding to the anti-Trump dossier, which means President Trump's theory of FBI-Democratic-Russian collusion is not supported by the evidence, but certain key Democrats did apparently lie about the Fusion GPS report funding, and the question is why.
	So that question remains an open question.
	And now the Democrats are pushing back by saying, listen, this is just an effort to discredit the dossier entirely.
	Well, yes, it is.
	I mean, by some people on the right, I think it is a disingenuous effort to say that everything in the dossier has already been discredited.
	As I say, some of it has been discredited.
	Some of it has not.
	But there are serious open questions on both sides of this.
	One, what in the dossier is true?
	Two, was steel being used by the Russians?
	Three, did the Democratic Party know that steel was being used by the Russians?
	And four, why did the Democrats lie about all of this if it was just an innocent opal research attempt?
	So here is Adam Schiff, who's a very militant anti-Trump guy, California representative, and he says that this entire story is just an effort to discredit Christopher Steele.
	Christopher Steele, no matter who is paying for his services, may have discovered before our own intelligence agencies that the Russians were going to interfere in our election on behalf of Donald Trump.
	So, we have a lot of work to do in terms of a lot of the claims in the dossier, but I don't think it really adds much value to know who paid for it necessarily, and I view this as part of the effort to discredit him, which really doesn't advance the investigation.
	Okay, so, Adam Schiff making the case that this is all just obfuscation.
	Well, it may all be obfuscation, but the Clinton campaign has some questions to answer.
	Now, a lot of people are doing this routine like, well, Hillary Clinton's not president, so who cares?
	Why is it a big deal?
	If Hillary's not president, what exactly are you whining about?
	And the answer is, if she had been president, you'd be saying it's beneath her to answer these questions.
	So, wrongdoing is still wrongdoing.
	And, again, it does shed light on the Russian collusion stuff, if, in fact, it turns out that the FBI used this dossier as the basis to wiretap people like Carter Page and Mike Flynn, and it was done in corrupt fashion with the help of the Russian government.
	We just don't have that information at this point.
	Any suggestions to the contrary are not true.
	Any suggestions to the contrary that the conspiracy theories have been confirmed, not true.
	So let's not get out in front of the story.
	Okay, I want to get to Jeff Flake resigning from the Senate in just a moment.
	But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the U.S.
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	That's DefendMyFamilyNow.com Again, DefendMyFamilyNow.com Okay, so the other big story of the day is the chaos that's broken out inside the Republican Party.
	And it's all around Jeff Flake, as well as Senator Bob Corker.
	So we talked about Corker yesterday, and the fact that Corker is really kind of an oozy, sleazy guy, and that he and Donald Trump have now gone at it, and so Corker is in opposition to President Trump, somewhat conveniently, and has decided he was not going to run for re-election.
	Now, Corker, if he had run for re-election, probably would have won.
	Jeff Flake is a bit of a different story.
	I think the story that's being told to you by the media today is not true.
	The story that's being told to you by the media today is basically Jeff Flake, intrepid Trump fighter, struck down in the prime of his young career because he stood up against the nastiest man in the universe, Donald Trump.
	Breitbart and Trump stand ascendant over the prone Flake's body as Flake speaks the truth to power.
	That's the story that you're getting, and you're getting it from all sides.
	You're getting it from Flake's camp, you're getting it from the Breitbart Trump people, and you're getting it from the media.
	And I have to say, I don't think this story is even close to the full story.
	So first, let me express...
	What I think the interests are for everyone in doing what happened yesterday.
	So to move back a little bit, Jeff Flake yesterday, the senator from Arizona, announced he would not run for re-election.
	And then he gave a long speech just ripping into President Trump as well as Republicans who were basically soft-pedaling President Trump for a long time.
	Now to Flake's credit in terms of consistency, Flake did not endorse President Trump during the last election cycle and was very critical of President Trump.
	I'm not saying that his opposition to President Trump isn't sincere.
	I think it is sincere.
	But I think the problem for Jeff Flake is that he knew that he was going down, and so for the past few months, he's basically attempted to carve out a position as the anti-Trump guy, right?
	The guy who's going to earn strange new respect from the left for saying things about Trump.
	I want to be fair here.
	I've said a lot of the same things about President Trump Jeff Flake says about President Trump.
	I agree with a lot of what Jeff Flake says about President Trump.
	But, the difference is that I also compliment Trump when I think he does something right, and I also acknowledge that people voted for Trump not because they embrace Trumpism, not because they think that Trumpism should replace conservatism, but because Trump was the only tool on hand at the time.
	Remember, Trump won a historic low percentage of votes in the Republican primaries to win the actual primaries.
	So it's not like he was well-loved inside the Republican Party.
	Once he was nominated, then the Republican Party swung behind him because he was the nominee against the most hated Democrat of my lifetime, Hillary Clinton.
	But that is not the same thing that Jeff Flake is saying.
	What Jeff Flake basically said in this speech is the Republican Party is a bunch of deplorables, right?
	I mean, he basically made the Hillary Clinton contention.
	The Republican Party is a bunch of deplorables who have fallen into league with Satan.
	Now, again, I think a lot of his critiques of Trump are true.
	And I think that people, I've been saying for a long time, people need to be intellectually honest about what Trump is and what Trump isn't, and they ought to call out lies and untruths and half-truths when they see them.
	They ought to call out the vulgarities and the stupidities that emanate from the White House.
	But that's not the same thing as saying that all Republicans are incapable of doing this.
	And this seemed to be Flake's contention.
	Flake was basically saying in this speech, listen, the reason I'm going down is not because of me.
	It's not even because of Trump.
	It's because the Republican Party has fallen into disrepair.
	The Republican constituents, my base, the people who elected me, are a bunch of dunderheads.
	It's not that they made a choice against Hillary Clinton.
	It's not that they held their nose and voted for Trump.
	It's not even that they like Trump, but they can also critique him.
	It's that they have fallen full-scale under the sway of President Trump.
	I think this is a wild overstatement.
	I also think it's a politically convenient one.
	So let's play Flake's speech, and then I'm going to explain what I think is really going on.
	So Flake gets up yesterday on the floor of the Senate, and he says that he is not going to run for re-election.
	He explains why.
	Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office.
	And there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles.
	Now is such a time.
	Okay, so he says that now is the time for all men of goodwill to stand up.
	Except that he's resigning, right?
	He's not sticking around to fight Trump's bad agenda items.
	He's not sticking around to run for re-election and try and, you know, wrest control of the party away from Trump.
	No, Jeff Flake is resigning.
	So where exactly is the, where is he risking his career in favor of principals?
	Where was the risk?
	This is the part that I don't really buy.
	The idea that he risked his career to stop President Trump.
	Jeff Flake has been the most unpopular senator in the United States Senate since 2013.
	So long before Trump was running for president.
	Long before anyone cared about Steve Bannon.
	Long before anyone cared about Breitbart.
	The fact is that Jeff Flake was a very unpopular senator pretty much from the get-go.
	There was an article in The Atlantic in 2013 that was titled, How Jeff Flake Became the Most Unpopular Senator in the United States, right?
	Four years ago, before Trump was a gleam in the media's eye or Bannon's eye and Bannon wasn't a gleam in the media's eye, right?
	The fact is that Jeff Flake was already unpopular.
	And the reason that Jeff Flake was unpopular is because he was a hard-right congressman who won 75% of the vote in his district for several terms running.
	And then he came to the Senate and he decided to move to the center.
	The American Conservative Union points out, as senator Flake's score is 80% over four years.
	As representative, his score was 98% over 10 years.
	It's a 20% drop-off in the ACU score, and it's not just that.
	Here's a list of some of his votes.
	Jason Johnson, who's a former Ted Cruz chief staffer, he laid out a bunch of the votes here.
	He suggested that, you know, it's—well, here's what he says.
	It's tempting to comment on Flake's floor speech, instead offering context on his view of governing by highlighting a few of his votes.
	Jeff Flake was one of 10 Republican senators who voted to confirm Loretta Lynch for attorney general.
	Flake voted to fund President Obama's unconstitutional executive amnesty.
	Flake voted against Senator Mike Lee's First Amendment Defense Act.
	Flake voted for President Obama's $1.1 trillion Kramnabus 2015 spending bill.
	Flake voted for S2114, which increased Russia's power at the IMF.
	Flake voted for a clean debt limit suspension.
	Flake was one of only 11 Republican senators who voted to confirm Janet Yellen.
	Flake voted for the Ryan-Murray budget, which lifted spending caps and raised taxes in exchange for promises of future spending cuts.
	Flake voted for the Gang of Eight amnesty bill.
	Flake voted for the post-Newtown gun grab.
	Flake voted against the Defund Obamacare Act of 2013.
	Flake voted to increase debt by $900 billion in exchange for the promise of discretionary cuts in the future in 2011.
	Flake preferred John Kasich over Cruz or Trump in the 2016 GOP primary.
	So the point here is that Jeff Flake used to be a much more conservative guy, and he moved to the center, and as he did, he lost the support of the people of Arizona.
	He looked disingenuous, and so he lost that support.
	So here he is saying that he's going down on the burning pyre of Trump, that he's falling on his sword, that he's basically the monk in Vietnam setting himself on fire to demonstrate to the entire world just how terrible President Trump is, but that's not really accurate.
	Jeff Flake was going to be primary.
	He's going to run a very tight primary no matter what.
	Now, his opposition to President Trump hasn't helped him for sure.
	But again, I think that it's less about his opposition to President Trump and more about his opposition to the people who voted for President Trump.
	And this is a distinction worthy of note.
	You can oppose things that Trump does.
	You can even say, I don't think Trump makes a very good president.
	You can do all of those things.
	But what you can't do, and what he hasn't done, you know, Jeff Flake has not voted against Trump's agenda items.
	Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, Jeff Flake has voted with President Trump's agenda items.
	So when he says that he doesn't like Trump, it's really more a matter of what Trump says and what Trump does as president, not a matter of policy.
	So how that materializes is, you can say, I think Trump is vulgarizing the discourse.
	I think President Trump would be better off if he stopped doing this stuff.
	I think President Trump is not a very good president because he's not doing these things.
	But that's not what Flake does.
	Instead, Flake seems to go at his own constituents, and he has been since April, basically saying the Republican Party was subject to a takeover by a bunch of dolts and morons.
	And I don't think that that's particularly smart politics, nor do I think it's true.
	I really don't think that's true.
	I think there were a bunch of people who voted for President Trump in the primaries who just thought he was the angriest guy on the stage and didn't think beyond that, which I do think is not smart.
	And then I think once we got past that, there were a lot of people who voted for Ted Cruz in the primaries, or voted for John Kasich in the primaries, who also voted for Donald Trump for president to stop Hillary Clinton.
	So Flake continues along these lines, and he decides that he is going to be the one who stands up to President Trump again.
	I think some of this is Flake posturing.
	The reason that I brought up his popularity ratings and his record is to demonstrate I think that the real story here for Flake is this.
	Flake does have sincere opposition to President Trump.
	He does not like President Trump.
	He thinks President Trump is a boor and a vulgarian.
	I think some of those critiques are fair.
	I really do.
	But...
	What's really happening here is that Flake was going to lose his primary anyway, and now he sees the opportunity to go out as the tragic hero who sacrificed himself in order to throw himself on the gears of the tank to stop President Trump, instead of just another senator who wasn't particularly popular in his home state and feels certain things about Trump.
	So now he has an interest in basically blaming Trump for his ouster.
	Now Trump and Breitbart have an interest in taking credit for his ouster because they can say, listen, we run the movement now.
	If you cross Trump, we will toss you overboard.
	Right?
	If you cross Trump, if you cross Breitbart, we will toss you.
	Again, Kelly Ward's been running for Senate for well over a year.
	Breitbart's only gotten involved at the very tail end, and Bannon's only getting involved now.
	The same thing is true of Roy Moore in Alabama.
	Bannon and Breitbart basically backed the guy who finished third, Mo Brooks, in the primary, until they switched to Roy Moore, and then they take credit.
	I think Jonah Goldberg has a good line about this.
	Bannon and Breitbart have a bad habit, when it comes to these races, of being the rainmaker who waits for the first rule of rainmaking, as Jonah says, is wait for it to start raining and then start dancing.
	Right?
	Because then people mistake the dancing for the cause of the rain.
	And I think that that's exactly what's happened here.
	So Breitbart and Trump have an interest in saying, we run the party now.
	Cross us and we'll burn you down.
	I don't think that's actually real.
	I don't think that's actually true.
	I think that you can cross Trump pretty much with impunity, actually.
	As long as you don't say, That people who voted for him were wrong to do so, or not understandable, it was foolish and ridiculous for them to do so, or they're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who sign off on everything Trump does because they voted for him.
	That's lefty talk and it's not accurate either.
	So Trump and Bannon I don't think are telling the truth, I don't think Flake is telling the full truth, and I think the media have an interest in this narrative too because it does a couple of things for them.
	One, it allows them to create this perception that Trump is the evil manipulator behind the scenes, the Palpatine behind the scenes, making sure people like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, the true heroes, are put to the boot.
	And I don't think that that's interest number one.
	And interest number two is they like portraying the Republican Party as split.
	And so anything they can do to exacerbate that split, they will do.
	So here's Jeff Flake going after President Trump directly.
	Mr. President, I rise today to say enough.
	We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal.
	So...
	With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it.
	We know better than that.
	By now, we all know better than that.
	So there he is.
	We all know better.
	Nothing good is coming around the corner.
	Again, all of this is fair, but I don't know why it's effective or useful.
	Like, I think that we all have our feelings about President Trump.
	I've been highly critical of President Trump.
	But I do not know what the purpose of all this is.
	And here's where he casts himself in the role of martyr.
	Here's where he does the Joan of Arc routine.
	He's going to hop up on that pyre and light the flame.
	He says that, you know, this is not about political savvy.
	This is about principle.
	It's about principle.
	Well, if it were really about principle, you'd stick around and run for re-election and see if you can convince the Republican Party to agree with your principles.
	He's bowing out because he knows he's going to lose.
	Here he is.
	I'm aware that more politically savvy people than I will caution against such talk.
	I'm aware that there is a segment of my party that believes that anything short of Complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect.
	Okay, so that last line, that my party believes anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect, I think that's a pretty small segment of the party, I really do.
	I think the Bill Mitchells of the party, the people who think that Trump cannot be criticized under any circumstances, I don't think that's right.
	I just don't think that's true.
	I think there have been a number of senators who have criticized Trump, including Rand Paul, by the way, who's going to win his re-election easily.
	You can criticize Trump so long as it doesn't feel like you're ripping his voters for voting for him.
	Again, he continues along these lines, and the martyr routine is a little bit strong here.
	He talks about how principled he is even more.
	If I have been critical, it is not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the President of the United States.
	If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so, and as a matter and duty of conscience.
	The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined, and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters.
	The notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric, and I believe profoundly misguided.
	Again, the idea that people aren't saying anything against Trump is just absurd.
	Everyone's saying things against Trump.
	Now, listen, I think some people have been cowards in this situation.
	I don't want to pretend that everyone has been, you know, paragons of virtue here.
	I think Paul Ryan doing the, I've never seen his tweets routine.
	I think that Mitch McConnell doing the, I'm just going to ignore whatever the president says routine.
	I think that's wrong.
	I think that they should speak out.
	But again, I don't think speaking out is the same thing as saying that you're going to go down simply because you spoke out.
	I don't think that's correct.
	The reason I'm objecting so strenuously to this is because I know enough conservatives to know that we are a good-hearted party.
	Still, that is attempting to do the right things.
	And I think that criticism of President Trump, so long as it's not taken as criticism of his voting base, I think that people are willing to go along with it.
	I think that what Jeff Flake is doing, and this is really what I object to, I feel like what Jeff Flake is doing here is he is surrendering the party to Trump and to Bannon and to the media's perception of what the Republican Party is.
	Solely so that he can look as though he's a martyr to this new Republican Party.
	So that he can play, you know, St.
	Thomas Beckett against Henry II.
	Like, I just don't... Henry II.
	I just don't see... I don't see the purpose of handing over the party to... I don't think this is true.
	I don't think that you have to hand over the party to everything Trump says, and drawing this false dichotomy, which is really what Flake is doing here, between the Bill Mitchell wing of the party and the true speaking wing of the party, and you have to pick one of those two.
	I don't think that's right.
	I think that You don't have to agree with Jeff Flake on everything in order to criticize President Trump, nor do you have to say that everyone who voted for President Trump is going along with every element of his agenda in order to say that those people were voting for some— Listen, I disagreed with that vote, right?
	I didn't vote for anyone at the top of the ticket, but at least I understood why the vote was happening.
	And I'm not going to attribute bad motivations to the people who disagreed with me on that vote.
	I mean, that's just, that's silly.
	And that's what I feel like Flake is doing.
	And I've got to say, it feels like some of this is for posturing and personal gain, considering he came out with a book called Conscience of a Conservative four months ago, and then did the rounds talking about how bad Trump was in the middle of a tough primary fight.
	If you want to win a primary, you don't go out there and then suggest that the party that embraced President Trump is a nasty, terrible party.
	What you can do instead is you can say, they were misinformed, which I think is true, that they were lied to, which I think is true, that there were people who were preying on a justified anger, which I think is true.
	But this is the equivalent of, this really is the equivalent of, remember when Hillary was asked whether she blamed women who didn't show up to vote for her?
	And she said, yes, of course I blame them.
	It feels like some of this.
	So it's convenient for Jeff Flake to do that while he's stepping down.
	Again, this is not even me disagreeing with Flake's critique of President Trump.
	I don't think President Trump has been a very good president.
	I think he's actually been very negative for conservatives in a number of ways.
	That doesn't mean he's been that across the board.
	I mean, as I've said, Gorsuch, regulatory cuts, right, all these things are good.
	But I think that the narrative that's being told to you right now is not true.
	And I want to explain a little bit more about this and why everybody is trotting out this narrative in just a second.
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	OK, so again, part of the problem with the speech is not that it was just an attack on Trump.
	I don't care.
	That's fine.
	Trump doesn't—like, Trump, I think, deserves to be attacked sometimes.
	I do it on a relatively frequent basis on the show.
	But it's Flake presenting himself as leader.
	If you see that the founders were right about people, The Founding Fathers basically said, the reason they structured the Constitution the way they did is because they said, people are ambitious.
	People want power.
	Ambition should therefore counteract ambition.
	They should check each other.
	If you see ambition as a prime mover in human motivation, then you're more likely to understand the political dynamic every day.
	So Jeff Flake is an ambitious guy, right?
	He's a senator, of course he's ambitious.
	And here he is trying to set himself up as leader of the sort of anti-Trump conservative resistance, even though he has not been supremely conservative as a senator by any stretch of the imagination.
	He and John Kasich are sort of doing the same thing here.
	And if you look at Steve Bannon, he's trying to set himself up as the leader of Trumpism.
	Even though there is no leader to Trumpism, because Trumpism doesn't exist, there is only Zool, right?
	Trump is the only one who exists.
	Trumpism is not a real philosophy.
	If you see that everyone is trying to set themselves up as leader, you're more likely to understand what's going on.
	So here is Jeff Flake trying to set himself up as leader in opposition to the bad, evil, terrible President Trump.
	Leadership knows that most often A good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home.
	Leadership knows where the buck stops.
	Humility helps.
	Character counts.
	Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly or debased appetites in us.
	Okay, again, I agree with a lot of this.
	I've said it before, that all politicians pander to anger.
	Politicians make their bank off of anger.
	But his idea that I am the leader, that's the undercurrent here.
	Leadership knows this.
	Leadership knows that.
	Who knows that?
	I know that.
	Well, that's amazing.
	Look at that coincidence.
	He finishes up by, and this is the part where I have a problem, where he basically throws the entire conservative agenda under the bus, saying, I am the representative of that conservative agenda.
	If I cannot survive as an anti-Trump speaker, then no one can survive.
	The party has been taken over.
	Run for the hills.
	I'm not ready to run for the hills.
	I'm not ready to surrender the party to people who are anti-free trade.
	I'm not ready to surrender the party to people who are not just anti-illegal immigration, as I am, but anti-immigration generally, as I am not.
	I'm not willing to surrender the party to, I think, the more base instincts of some people.
	I'm not ready to do that, because I don't think that's my party.
	I don't think that's my movement.
	Maybe Jeff Flake is right.
	Maybe it's time for despair.
	There's a lot of despair, I think, in the traditional conservative movement, that the party has been soul-sucked.
	I feared that that was going to happen when Trump took office.
	I fear it a little less now.
	I don't think that the party has been soul-sucked.
	I don't think every conservative has become a Trumpkin on every issue.
	I think that conservatives, as I've said before, see President Trump as a litmus test.
	That if you are going to say that Trump is awful, terrible, no good, very bad, evil, and unjustifiable, and that any vote for him was a bad vote, If you're going to say that, then that's not a referendum on Trump.
	That's a referendum on all the people who voted for him.
	It's the Hillary Clinton deplorables line all over again.
	I think that that is a point that people are using Trump to elucidate.
	I think people are using Trump as a bit of a litmus test.
	But you can still oppose Trump when he does things that are wrong.
	You can still speak up when he does things that are stupid.
	And I think constituents mostly understand that because a lot of Congress people do that.
	But here is the final thing that Jeff Flake says.
	Again, this is the part I really disagree with.
	This is why I think his motivations here are not entirely sterling.
	It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party.
	The party that has so long defined itself by its belief in those things.
	It is also clear to me for the moment that we have given in or given up on the core principles in favor of a more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment.
	To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess that we've created are justified.
	But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.
	There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal by mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems.
	The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people.
	Okay, so I agree with a lot of the statements that he's making about the appeal to anger.
	I've said the exact same thing on this show.
	I don't disagree with him.
	But it's that first sentence that bothers me.
	The anger and the resentment, he is right.
	They are not a governing strategy.
	But he himself is suggesting that they are replete with a particular philosophy, and I don't think that's right.
	I don't think that's true.
	The same anger and resentment that drove the Tea Party to victory based on a small government platform drove President Trump to victory based on a populist platform, because anger does not have any philosophy to which it attaches exclusively.
	Anger, it can be anti-establishment anger, and that's what we're watching.
	And that's why I have hope for the future of the conservative movement, because I think that that anger can be turned, and should be turned, toward the right things, not the wrong things.
	I think President Trump has turned things toward the wrong things.
	I think he's turned anger toward things that are unjustified.
	I think that he has excused bad behavior.
	I think that he has made the case on philosophically false grounds that the American people are being screwed by people who really have nothing to do with it.
	I think all of those things are true.
	But the idea that That that represents, that Trumpism is the final iteration of Americans' anger.
	That Trumpism is the final stage of Republican anger.
	I don't think that's right.
	I think Trump was the most convenient angry guy at their disposal and they picked him and it's that simple.
	It's not that they have rejected limited government and free markets.
	It's not that they've rejected limited government and free markets.
	I agree that anger cannot be the prime motivator for conservative thought.
	But to suggest that anger has become that prime motivator and Trump is the sole evidence you need and Jeff Flake's ouster is the sole evidence you need is self-serving and a little bit hypocritical.
	I want to talk more about this.
	Plus, things I like, things I hate, and a little bit of Bible talk.
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	So now I'm going to show you that, uh, and now I'm going to show you why everyone has an interest in pushing the false narrative that what happened here was not a Senator who was going to lose bowing out and then putting that in the best possible light by attacking president Trump.
	I can't Again, not insincerely, but a little bit politically cynically.
	Instead, we've gotten this narrative, Jeff Flake, fallen hero, Donald Trump, villain who put him out.
	And everybody basically has the same take because it's convenient for all of them.
	So here's the Huffington Post headline.
	All right, Huffington Post headlined this yesterday.
	There's the HuffPost big banner headline yesterday.
	Bannon storms the desert, right?
	It's Bannon who took out Jeff Flake.
	Nonsense.
	Nonsense.
	I worked at Breitbart, okay?
	This is crap.
	It's crapola.
	Kelly Ward was running against Jeff Flake for well over a year before Bannon even knew how to spell Arizona.
	This idea that Breitbart was the soul mover here is a creation of the media because the media love this story, right?
	They want it to be a fight for the soul of the party between two bad guys.
	That's their goal, right?
	The losers are all the good, honest, noble men, the people for whom the media have a strange new respect, right?
	Jeff Flake, strange new respect.
	Ben Sasse, strange new respect.
	Ben Shapiro, strange new respect, right?
	There's this idea that anytime you oppose Trump, strange new respect from the media.
	The media have an interest in promulgating that narrative because what they want is The people who are losing are the people for whom they have strange new respect, the good folks, the people who have been exiled from the party.
	And the people who are winning?
	It's Steve Bannon and his white nationalist brute squad.
	They're the people who are winning.
	So Huffington Post is happy to push that.
	Of course, so is Breitbart.
	So Breitbart immediately posts the HuffPo headline as its own headline, saying, look, even HuffPo says this.
	Of course, HuffPost says this.
	I mean, they have an interest in pushing this.
	Trump has an interest in pushing this.
	Jeff Flake has an interest in pushing this.
	I think everyone is misinterpreting here.
	I think it's a big mistake, right?
	Ari Fleischer, who typically, his political analysis is pretty good.
	But, you know, when he says this is a win for Trump and Bannon, in what sense is it a win for Trump and Bannon?
	I mean, it's quite possible that Kelly Ward loses the Senate race and then Trump loses the seat in Arizona.
	And again, you can't pin this one on Trump because Jeff Flake was You know, the lowest rated senator among his home state contingent of any senator in the country for years before any of this happened.
	Look at events today and not declare that Donald Trump won.
	Steve Bannon won.
	The fact of the matter is the people they like least, the establishment, organizations inside, people inside the Republican Party, are not running for re-election because Donald Trump has helped chase them out of the party.
	But go back in time.
	It is true.
	You go back to the primary and 16 candidates, many of them cut from the same cloth as Corker and of Lake, couldn't compete with Donald Trump.
	Ted Cruz and Donald Trump got 80% of all Republican votes cast in that primary.
	The establishment candidates got less than 20% state by state by state from the beginning to the very end.
	So now you are seeing that manifestation of it play out in the Senate.
	What I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is they said you must fight, you must stop, you must stand up to President Trump.
	But then they don't run.
	It seems to me, if you feel that fervently about standing up to fight, then you go through your primary and you prove that you can move Republicans to your direction, but instead of fighting, they yield it.
	Yes, I mean, I agree with the last part of what Fleischer is saying there, but what I hate is the combination where he says that, where he just sort of slips that in, 80% of the primary vote went to Trump and Cruz.
	Yes, and Cruz had policy prescriptions that were precisely the opposite of Trump's in many of these cases, and he was winning heavy percentages of the vote as a really unattractive candidate.
	Which, again, shows that Trump is the avatar of the anger, but he is not the new philosophy of the Republican Party.
	I'm not willing to surrender the party that Jeff Flake is.
	This is my biggest objection with Jeff Flake.
	What Jeff Flake did yesterday is he basically said, the party is now Trump's party.
	The party is not Trump's party.
	Trump is just the figurehead for a party, and he's a figurehead of the id.
	But Jeff Flake had every right to be in the Senate, just as Trump has to be in the White House.
	And the idea that Jeff Flake is sort of responsible for, that Donald Trump is the final iteration, is just silliness.
	It's not true.
	Trump is not, and again, conflating his popularity and his ideology would be a big mistake and a not true one.
	It's just not true.
	Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll do a little bit of Bible talk.
	So, things I like.
	So today's Things I Like is a podcast called Another Kingdom.
	This is a fictional podcast put together by our very own Andrew Klavan and performed by our very own Michael Knowles.
	It is not actually a Daily Wire project.
	One of the reasons for that is because it is replete with cursing.
	But it is really entertaining, it's really well done.
	Knowles acts it, Klavan wrote it, and the basic premise is that there's a failed Hollywood screenwriter Uh, who stumbles into a doorway that leads him, a portal that leads him into basically a fantasy knights and maidens world.
	Uh, and it's, it's really well written.
	It's really fun to listen to.
	Uh, it's not, you know, old radio drama in the sense that you have like the, the cheesy squeaking sounds of the shoes on the pavements or anything.
	Um, but it's, it's great to listen to and it's getting good numbers.
	Go and check Another Kingdom and go subscribe to it.
	I think Ricochet puts it out.
	And you can do that at iTunes or SoundCloud as well.
	Andrew Clavin's Another Kingdom performed by our very own Michael Knowles, who shockingly has the capacity to act, actually.
	I was surprised by that, considering our interactions in the theatrical sense here at the office, because so far, I've not seen the acting chops.
	But he shows them.
	He shows them in Another Kingdom, so check it out.
	OK, time for some things that I hate.
	So it's virtue signaling all around.
	Kathy Griffin has decided to disown her former disowning of her beheading of Donald Trump.
	So you recall that she infamously held up a beheaded sort of mock-up of Trump's head with blood dripping over the face in almost ISIS fashion.
	And she was castigated for it.
	She lost her job at CNN for it on New Year's Eve.
	And now Kathy Griffin is back at it.
	And she's saying Trump's a psycho.
	She's trying to earn her way back in.
	And it'll be fascinating to see whether the Hollywood elite accept her back in.
	I think there's a good chance that they will because, you know, as time heals all wounds, it looked bad in the moment that she was beheading President Trump, but they really hate President Trump down deep too, so she'll probably start going to all the good cocktail parties again.
	Here she is calling President Trump a psycho.
	These Trump folks, they self-identify as deplorables, like, as if that's a good thing.
	And they're psychos.
	I mean, they're nuts.
	So I'm here to apologize.
	I'm sorry that we have put this guy on everybody else's lap.
	And I don't know what's happening in my own country.
	You know, when Kathy Griffin says things like, you know, they call themselves deplorables, the reason they say they're deplorables is because they're mocking Hillary Clinton, who said that half of all Trump voters are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who hate the poor.
	I mean, let's be real about that.
	And does she think that she's winning anyone over to her side?
	Again, I think that very few people in the country right now are focused on winning over new converts to their side.
	Again, this is my objection to Flake's speech.
	I don't think Flake's speech wins people over to his side.
	I think Flake's speech actually alienates a lot of the people he's attempting to reach out to, and I think he had a habit of that, which is why he was losing his Senate race to Kelly Ward, an osteopathic physician who apparently has questioned the validity of chemtrails before.
	You know, like, I just don't...
	The virtue signaling has to stop from all sides.
	It's just, it's virtue signaling, like, try to convince someone.
	It's so funny, you know, I get ripped in the press.
	I got ripped in the New York Times for quote-unquote not trying to convince people.
	I would bet dollars to Donuts that we have more leftists and liberals who listen to this program than who listen to the vast majority of other conservative programs.
	And I would guarantee you that the number of products that I personally have endorsed and said people should go read on Things I Like, from the left is much higher than it would be on some shows of the left, because I think it's interesting to read the other side.
	Kathy Griffin isn't interested in having the conversation.
	She's interested in calling people Nazis.
	Again, this is how you got Trump.
	Another way you got Trump is stupidity like this.
	There's this protester who showed up at the Senate yesterday, and President Trump was walking through with Turtley Turtle Man Mitch McConnell, and here is the protester throwing Russian flags at President Trump.
	Trump is treason!
	Trump is treason!
	Why are you talking about tax cuts when you should be talking about treason?
	Why is Congress talking about tax cuts when they should be talking about treason?
	This president conspired with agents of the Russian government to steal an election.
	We should be talking about treason in Congress, not about tax cuts.
	Okay, so that guy, of course, was very happy to get all the attention.
	What I hate about this is not the guy throwing the flags, because that's dumb, but, you know, it's America.
	It's free speech.
	Is it great that he's doing that right in front of the president?
	Not particularly, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it.
	What I do love is look at how the media's cameras shift, right?
	They're following Trump down the hall, and then immediately they all flip their cameras, and you can see one of the cameramen sort of grinning at the guy screaming, Trump is treason.
	You know, the media eat this stuff up.
	They love the polarization.
	It's their favorite thing.
	Instead of focusing on what unifies us, the media have an interest in driving us apart.
	Okay, final thing that I hate.
	Paul Ryan says that the DREAM Act, the new DREAM Act, is going to be part of the spending bill.
	Once again, I hate omnibus bills.
	I hate them.
	The idea that in order for me to fund defense, I have to fund the DREAM Act, green cards for so-called DREAMers.
	It's absurd.
	It's absurd.
	And it's another broken promise from conservatives who said they were going to stop Obama's executive amnesty, not that they were going to reinforce Obama's executive amnesty on the legislative level.
	Okay, so, I want to do a little bit of Bible talk today.
	So I've decided to change the format of Bible talk.
	Instead of just taking whatever the Jews happen to be reading this week, I'm going to just give a biblical thought that has been occurring to me, because I do spend a fair bit of time thinking about the depth of the Bible.
	So a couple of weeks ago, we started reading the Torah again in the Jewish community.
	We had the holiday of Simchat Torah where we celebrate the finishing of the cycle of reading the Torah.
	And then we start reading again from the beginning.
	So we read the first chapters of Genesis.
	So the parasha itself is Bereshit in the beginning.
	And I have a read on the tree of good and evil, knowledge of good and evil, that I think is kind of interesting at the very least.
	So, here I want to pose two ideas that are sort of in opposition.
	One is the idea of Aristotelian good, and the other is the idea of moral good.
	These are not the same thing.
	So, the way Aristotle thought of something being good was the way that you would think of a watch being good.
	Or a hamburger being good.
	What makes something good, in the Aristotelian view, is that it is fitted to its purpose.
	My watch is good, my MVMT watch right here, this watch is good, because it tells time and looks good.
	That is its job, and so it is good at being a watch.
	You're good at being a radio host if you can get listeners.
	You're good at being a senator if you are capable of exercising independent judgment and acting on behalf of the interests of the United States.
	That's what makes you good at things.
	And you're a good person, according to Aristotelian thought, if you fulfill the function of a human, which is to think and reason.
	This is basically Aristotle's notion of good and then virtue is all the qualities that you have to push in yourself so that you can achieve these heights of reason and rationality.
	That's Aristotelian good.
	Moral good is something different.
	Moral good is the idea that we determine of our own thinking what is a good thing to do and what is a bad thing to do.
	What is a moral thing to do and what is an immoral thing to do.
	It has little to do with purpose itself.
	It has to do more with our moral intuition.
	This, I think, is what the Bible is trying to tell us at the very beginning.
	So, at the very beginning of the Bible, when God says, let there be light, and then there's light, and then God says, it says, and God saw that the light was good, it was evening and it was morning the first day, right?
	When it does that, when it says, and God saw that it was good, what does it mean it was good?
	Does it mean the light was morally good?
	What did the light do to earn that sort of moniker?
	Right?
	It says it was tov, it was good.
	What it did is it was good at being a light, right?
	It fulfilled its purpose.
	It was fitted to its purpose.
	On the first six days, the only thing that is not considered fitted to its purpose is the separation of the firmaments, the separation of the waters on day two.
	But everything else is considered fitted to its purpose, right?
	It is towed.
	Then we get into the Garden of Eden.
	Man has now been created, and God says, here's the Tree of Life, and here's the Tree of Good and Evil.
	He says you can eat from the Tree of Life.
	He never tells people not to eat from the Tree of Life, right?
	For all we know, Adam and Eve were eating from the Tree of Life regularly.
	Because he never forbids them from doing that.
	He only forbids them from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
	Okay, the word evil only pops up its head for the first time in this context.
	And what the Torah is saying here is it's contrasting the idea of tov, meaning fitted to its purpose, from good and evil in moral terms.
	And what it's saying is, if man would think in terms of what purpose are you fitted for, what purpose did God fit you to, you'll live a happier, more complete life than if you are making up your own standards of right and wrong.
	Right?
	Your subjective standards of right and wrong.
	Now God has implanted his morality in the world, is the idea here.
	Right?
	He has implanted... His morality can be discerned by discerning purpose.
	And that's the idea of the original good.
	But the tree of knowledge of good and evil says that man can create his own perceptions, his own subjective perceptions, of what it is that's good and evil.
	Right?
	This morally relativistic perspective.
	And so what is the natural punishment for that?
	Once you've done that, once you've decided that you're going to take the world that God created, ignore His purpose, and make your own, then everything falls out of kilter, right?
	You're not actually acting in accordance with nature.
	You're no longer acting in accordance with how nature is supposed to work.
	So what happens?
	God says, it's not a curse.
	It's not that God's angry.
	God says the natural consequence of you eating from the tree of good and evil is that you can no longer live forever in the sense that you're not now a part of nature.
	You're something separate from nature, judging it as something apart from nature for its good and moral content.
	And also, the earth will not yield you its fruit, right?
	You're gonna have to work for a living.
	Childbirth is going to be painful, right?
	I'm sure childbirth was painful before the eating from the tree, but the idea was that that was part of the purpose, right?
	Part of the purpose was the pain, because the pain is what allows you to- I mean, it's the cramps that push the baby out, right?
	It is the uterus seizing up that pushes the baby out.
	We understood that.
	But now, all of a sudden, we recognize pain as evil.
	We recognize work as an evil.
	And so now, stuff that was just considered natural and purposeful is considered an evil.
	So we start seeing things in darker terms.
	And that's what happens.
	That's the transition.
	It's not that human beings become inherently evil.
	It's not the original sin is that we now become sinful.
	It's that before, when you're acting in accordance with God's purpose, as we were before acting in accordance with the Aristotelian notion of God's good, when you do that, Then you are always going to be acting with the good, and sin doesn't become an issue.
	But sin becomes an issue as soon as we start substituting our own judgment for God's, in terms of not purpose of good, but in terms of what we personally think is morally good for us.
	Because we're not the final judges of that.
	God made us.
	We did not make God, and we did not make the morality that God created and embedded in the universe.
	Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with more deep thoughts like that, and presumably more fallout from all the political matters of the day.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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